Go Live Partners Series: Rare Crowds

Founded in 2012, Bellevue, Washington based Rare Crowds (http://wp.rarecrowds.com), is a SaaS Cloud Service Vendor and Microsoft Bizspark partner. Rare Crowds sells ad purchasing efficiency solutions to international enterprises in the advertising industry with plans to expand into SMB over time.

Ad buys are expensive, and no one ever buys just one ad so the waste associated with buying inefficient ads multiply. Especially in large companies that buy hundreds of ad placements at a time, any efficiencies at all can yield large monetary returns. To generate these efficiencies, Rare Crowds needs data – and lots of it. Not to mention the computing power to crunch all of that data. Putting it all together yields the right ad being delivered to the right audience at the right time.

Rare Crowds had choices when it came to deciding on which cloud vendor to work with. Several factors contributed to their decision to work with Microsoft to build on Windows Azure. Obviously, the technical capabilities of the Windows Azure platform had to be there. But they also wanted great developer support and a great partner to work with – one throat to choke, as it were. Their comfort with the .NET Framework makes it important that their cloud vendor fully supports .NET as a first class citizen. The solid integration with Visual Studio, making developers more productive because of their familiarity with the tools, played a big role as well. And to top it all off, they find OPX to be noticeably cheaper on Azure.